


We Have Come So Far - It Is Over

by ventrue_antitribu



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-30 00:58:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15085553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ventrue_antitribu/pseuds/ventrue_antitribu
Summary: An unwilling traitor to the Camarilla and her foster Sire talk shop about her apparent return to the Sabbat whilst his conditioning over her begins to take hold. Or something like that.





	We Have Come So Far - It Is Over

Delaney’s thoughts no longer race. She is lying on her back, stone still and eyes screwed half shut to filter pinpoints of light through her lashes until her vision swims. She reaches deep, grasping helplessly within her psyche for some stray thread of her previous night’s panic. All that rises to meet her dull hunger is a slow dread which swells and ebbs in time with the movement of her head around fleeting questions.

 

In Delaney’s hand is the cell phone which she’d rendered worthless. She brings the smooth black screen before her face languidly, blinking at it a few times as if trying to glean something. Her reflection, disheveled and maimed, smiles down at her. Delaney is not smiling. She runs her tongue along the inside of her split cheek, mulling over the scar tissue and counting seconds. 

 

_ Seventeen thousand nine hundred forty-five. . . _

 

Nearly five hours, all of this against a span of - what? And for what reason? Her throat tightens and she feels a pressure behind her eyes, only because she wills it there.  _ And for what reason? _ Her fingers tighten around the useless device and she hurls it into the far wall without raising her head to see where it lands even as it bounces and skitters somewhere beneath the bed she is lying next to. 

 

The sound jolts her senses just slightly, but also serves to drown out the click of the lock on the door. The man who enters is tall, with handsomely cruel features, the kind of face the word ‘hawkish’ doesn’t quite encapsulate. Delaney is watching him intently from the second he enters. 

She is still prone, vision inverse. She feels the sting of some hideous madness writhe beneath her skin. For the first time ever, she longs to kill this feeling. She cannot, and at least it is something which permeates her increasing empty. 

_ Anything, even this loneliness. Anything at all. _

 

Jaxton’s gaze is not on Delaney, at least not at first. He looks to the further-ruined cell phone as he closes the door behind him. He nudges his glasses up, pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes. 

 

_ Eighteen thousand one hundred nine. Why, tell me, please tell me why- _

 

When he opens his eyes once more they are trained on Delaney, and the way he regards her rests somewhere between disgust and apathy.    
_ Please, I love you. _ _  
_ “What are you doing.” He is not inviting an answer, nor does he wait for one. “Get up.” Delaney does so in an absent, fluid motion. He takes a seat at one of the two chairs in the room and gestures towards the other as Delaney turns to face him. She lingers and he raises a brow, pursing his lips. 

This is all she needs. She has always worn her obsequity so very well. She sits across from him, watching his hands as he refills his glass. “Look at me.”    
So she faces the distaste in his otherwise unfeeling stare head on, allows it to wash over her, welcomes his ire with a delicate smile.  For now, there is nothing more to their unspoken exchange.

Jaxton sets aside the untouched glass on the table and Delaney’s eyes are drawn to it before her attention is immediately called back to him as he snaps his fingers loudly, catching her faltering. “Well?”   
Delaney drums her nails on the table slowly, smile fading. She makes a humming sound, deliberating. “Good evening, Aurelio.” The absolute barest hint of mocking, some subtle last gasp of her dying autonomy, flavors the words nicely in her mouth. The briefest twitch of the bridge of Jaxton’s nose lets her know he knows, even if he doesn’t acknowledge it.   
“Good evening, Delaney.”    
_ Why is he stalling?  _ “What did you know about her?”   
Jaxton scowls emphatically. “This? Still? You know I don’t like to repeat myself, Delaney-”   
“I know, sir.”   
“Then  _ why _ ?” He growls quietly. 

_  
_ _ Why not? _

 

The mad longing which writhes beneath Delaney’s skin now unfurls into quiet mania. 

She pushes herself up from the table, standing still for the time being with her palms flat on the cool wood. Jaxton doesn't respond save for his eyes following her own. They remain in silence as Delaney slips around the table to stand before him. She stares down at him, hooking her thumbs through her belt loops, boney fingers splayed across the tops of her thighs. The quiet language in her stance is a paradox; at once cautiously irreverent yet still deeply respectful - fearful.

“Well, Delaney?” Her eyes are once more drawn to his hands where they rest folded next to her atop the table and he clears his throat.

“What did you know about her?” 

Jaxton grinds his teeth, Delaney can see the tension in his jaw as her gaze once more rises to meet his. Without looking, Delaney's fingers find the side of his hand and follow the curve of his bone structure where his wrist disappears into his sleeve, delicately tracing her nails against his skin. The nails of her opposite hand rasp over the skin of her thigh as she grips at the leg of her shorts. 

Her legs and hips are tensed, spine taut with monstrous desire, a long unaddressed lust she knows she should fear especially as the disgust in Jaxton’s stare becomes considerably less muted. She is heedless still, not withdrawing her hand from his wrist, now tracing his veins with the pad of her thumb.

“What are you  _ doing, Delaney _ ?” Jaxton spits. The way he says her name in this moment holds destructive power. She pulls her lower lip between her teeth and sucks at the skin unthinkingly. She closes her fingers around his wrist and watches him rapt through lidded eyes. His tendons coil beneath her palm.

“If you won't answer me that then please, sir - tell me how you would execute this of your own will.”

“I am not going to entertain this, Delaney.” The words are laced with warning.

_ Why are you stalling? _

She leans forward, looming over him, threading the fingers not occupied all but pinning his wrist through his slicked hair, cupping the back of his head. 

“I know you don't owe it to me, sir, but what will it matter in some stretch of tens of thousands of seconds? I am no threat to you, Aurelio. I never have been.”

“What will it matter indeed?” For the briefest of moments Delaney believes she sees him look away into the far corner of the room where the surveillance camera she had dismantled on her night of arrival had been suspended. “You make the argument for me.” But she is already on to the next notion that crosses her mind.

“And what will you get from any of this, ultimately? When all is said and done, where will it see you?” She traces her fingertips forward from the back of his head, along his jaw then lowers her hand to rest against his collar. Consciously he doesn't react, all but ignoring her looming, her hands. Delaney can see the predatory dilation of his pupils, feel the tension of the muscles in his arm and in his neck. “What keeps  _ you _ loyal, what promise - what function? And what would happen if you just… Weren't here any longer? If you just left one day.”

The moments which pass between them pass in a silence so thick it suffocates the sense of time passing itself. In inimitable stillness.

And so Delaney doesn't notice the intervening events which find her on her back on the table, never breaking gazes with the elder Ventrue.

“Enough.” His tone is level in it's commanding but it is a sparsely constrained fury which seizes Delaney. Her hands fall to her sides and he pins her chest beneath his palm, fingers of his other hand gripping her chin firmly.

“What has gotten into you?”

Delaney licks her lips, scored from chewing, and the corners of her mouth twitch into a worried frown.

“Don't look at me like that.”

He is standing over her, her legs low on his hips. Delaney reaches up to curl her fingers loosely around either of his wrists, gently trying to unpin herself from beneath him. After a brief display of this, Jaxton releases her, pulling himself free from her grip easily in turn. “Answer me, Delaney.”

Her only response is to right herself on the edge of the table before him. She hooks her fingers into the waist of his pants, pulling him closer. She snakes her hands over his lower abdomen beneath his shirt, over his hips, dragging her nails up his back. 

All the while Jaxton is tense, non-reciprocating and unresponsive, still pinning her unblinking in his stare.    
“Delaney.” Once more he speaks her name in warning as she urges him closer, kneading the muscles of his back and wrapping her legs around his own. She pulls herself to him and he finally responds by gripping her sides hard enough to bruise, pressing his thumbs beneath her ribs.

Delaney doesn’t relent even now, slipping one hand from beneath his shirt to grip at his hair. She rests her forehead against his own, staring deep into his eyes, striving desperately to impress some iota of her pain upon him; terror, hunger, rapture. Her spine shivers in response to Jaxton’s fingers pressing harder into the hollow spaces between her bones, digging pits into her skin until her vitae wells up around his nail-beds.

Delaney searches his eyes for answers, for anything at all, even the disgust with which he had regarded her on entry to this cell.

“Are they listening?” She whispers against the corner of his mouth. 


End file.
